Brazil's Superior Court Sends the Fraud Charge Against Flamengo's Bruno Henrique Back for a New Ruling

The question is whether Betano, KTO, GaleraBet and Blaze ever asked for the forward to be prosecuted for defrauding them, and whether they did so in time. The separate charge of fraud in a sporting competition, over a yellow card in November 2023, is unaffected.

• Justice Joel Ilan Paciornik of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) has annulled a ruling of the Federal District court of appeal and ordered it to decide again whether the fraud (estelionato) charge against Flamengo forward Bruno Henrique can proceed, according to reports first published by UOL
• The point it must now address is the defence's argument that the four betting operators named as victims did not ask the police or prosecutors to act within the six-month limit, having reported the bets first to the integrity bodies IBIA and Sportradar and then to the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF)
• The charge of fraud in a sporting competition, under Article 200 of the General Sport Law, which carries two to six years in prison, is not affected
• Prosecutors say the player deliberately got himself booked against Santos on 1 November 2023 after telling his brother, so that relatives and friends could bet on it; he has denied wrongdoing, and the sports tribunal cleared him of match manipulation in November 2025 while fining him R$100,000
• Two of the alleged victims, Betano and Blaze, were among the licensed brands that went dark in Brazil this morning under the betting ban

The STJ Sends the Fraud Charge Back to Brasília

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice has reopened the dispute over whether Bruno Henrique can be tried for fraud against betting companies. In a decision reported on Tuesday 6 October, Justice Joel Ilan Paciornik annulled the judgment in which the 3rd Criminal Panel of the Court of Justice of the Federal District and Territories (TJDFT) rejected the defence's motion for clarification, and ordered the panel to rule on it again, this time addressing the argument that the operators' right to seek prosecution had lapsed, according to UOL's report as carried by several outlets. The STJ's record could not be consulted for this article, so the case number and the decision's text have not been seen.

The decision is procedural. It acquits no one and does not touch the charge of fraud in a sporting competition, on which he has been a defendant since July 2025. The criminal case had been suspended while the STJ considered the appeal, according to Bahia Notícias.

Why the Operators' Silence Matters

Since the 2019 anti-crime package, fraud under Article 171 of the Penal Code could generally be prosecuted only if the victim asked for it, a step known as representation, which under Article 38 of the Code of Criminal Procedure must be taken within six months of the victim learning who the author is. On 25 July 2025 Judge Fernando Brandini Barbagalo of the 7th Criminal Court of Brasília accepted the charge under Article 200 of the General Sport Law against Bruno Henrique and his brother, Wander Nunes Pinto Júnior, but rejected the fraud charges against all of the accused. He found that none of the four operators named as victims, KTO, Betano, GaleraBet and Blaze, had filed a representation, that the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), whose alert started the investigation, cannot represent them, and that the operators' replies to police in September 2024 said only that they were available to cooperate.

Prosecutors appealed, and on 4 December 2025 the TJDFT's 3rd Criminal Panel, with Judge Demetrius Gomes Cavalcanti as rapporteur, unanimously accepted the fraud charges against Bruno Henrique and eight others. It held that representation needs no formality, only an unequivocal interest in prosecution, and that operators have a legal duty under the General Sport Law and SPA Ordinance 1.231 of 2024 to report suspected manipulation, so that their compliance alerts and prompt answers to the police amounted to valid representation and ruled out any lapse. The panel rejected the defence's motion for clarification on 23 April 2026; the STJ has now found, according to the reports, that the six-month point was not properly answered.

The Yellow Card at the Mané Garrincha

The case concerns Flamengo's 2 to 1 defeat by Santos at the Mané Garrincha stadium in Brasília on 1 November 2023. According to the indictment summarised in the TJDFT's ruling, Bruno Henrique told his brother in advance that he would get himself booked; Wander then passed the information to his partner, a cousin and a friend, who spread it further, and all of them bet on the card. The forward was booked in stoppage time and then sent off after protesting to the referee. Prosecutors say 98% of the volume Betano took in the card market for that match was on Bruno Henrique being booked, against about 95% at GaleraBet, and that the accounts were either newly created or belonged to customers betting far above their usual stakes.

The sporting case is over, and shows how hard intent is to prove when a player might take a card for tactical reasons. The 1st Disciplinary Commission of the Superior Court of Sports Justice (STJD) suspended him for 12 matches and fined him R$60,000 (approximately $11,500) in September 2025. On appeal in November 2025 the full tribunal, by six votes to three, acquitted him of acting to influence a result and fined him R$100,000 (approximately $19,200) for breaching competition rules, with no suspension. "Jamais cometi as infrações que estou sendo acusado" (I never committed the offences I am accused of), the player told the commission, according to Metrópoles. During the appeal, Flamengo's lawyer, Michel Assef Filho, told reporters the player had been advised to take a third yellow card for tactical reasons, to sit out a match against Fortaleza and be available against Palmeiras, which he said was not unsporting, according to CNN Brasil. After the April ruling his defence said it would show the STJ "o claro equívoco da denúncia" (the clear error of the indictment), according to Poder360.

The Victims Are Being Asked to Want a Prosecution They Never Requested

The fraud charge rests on an odd premise: that four operators were deceived and harmed, yet none of them formally asked for anyone to be prosecuted. The TJDFT closed that gap by treating the integrity alerts that the market now requires as representation. If that stands, every suspicious-betting report an operator files through IBIA or Sportradar may also count as a request to prosecute its customers for fraud, whether or not the operator intends it. If the STJ's intervention leads the panel to the trial judge's view, the operators' route to a fraud prosecution will run through formal complaints filed in time, a step the Code of Criminal Procedure leaves to a company's legal representatives rather than its integrity team. Congress removed the representation requirement for fraud in April 2026, through Law 15.397, but the case concerns events in 2023.

The Alleged Victims Have Left the Market

Betano, Flamengo's master sponsor, and Blaze were among the licensed brands that closed their Brazilian sites on Tuesday under Provisional Measure 1.394, the ban that extinguishes every licence on 25 October. This case began with operators monitoring their own markets, the kind of integrity alert on which spot-fixing cases depend and which the licensed regime later made a formal duty. If the ban holds, much of the betting that remains is likely to move to offshore sites that report to no Brazilian authority, and the next suspicious booking may never be flagged at all.

The STJ has not cleared Bruno Henrique; it has told a lower court to answer a question it skipped. The answer will decide whether betting operators in Brazil are victims who must ask for justice, or witnesses whose reports are enough.